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5 Journals to Check Out During SAGE’s Free Online Access Period!

During the month of April, SAGE is offering new and returning users free access over 1.5 million articles from over 940 SAGE journals through afree trial! Ready to start reading SAGE content? Here are a few journals and articles you can look forward to reading when you sign up for the free trial:

Creativity and innovation in any organization are vital to its successful performance. The authors review the rapidly growing body of research in this area with particular attention to the period 2002 to 2013, inclusive. Conceiving of both creativity and innovation as being integral parts of essentially the same process, we propose a new, integrative definition. We note that research into creativity has typically examined the stage of idea generation, whereas innovation studies have commonly also included the latter phase of idea implementation. The authors discuss several seminal theories of creativity and innovation and then apply a comprehensive levels-of-analysis framework to review extant research into individual, team, organizational, and multilevel innovation. Key measurement characteristics of the reviewed studies are then noted. In conclusion, we propose a guiding framework for future research comprising 11 major themes and 60 specific questions for future studies.

Beginning in 1996, the state of Georgia embarked on a bold experiment in public management reform, embracing employment at-will (EAW) for public employees. Public human resource management (PHRM) research since the Georgia reforms has called for a greater appreciation for the link between personnel reforms and performance. This research examines whether the appeal for more exacting research has been taken up. The analysis provides an overview of research on public personnel reform, focusing on five themes identified by the literature: decentralization, performance-based pay, declassification, deregulation, and privatization. Reviewing 238 articles in 13 journals since 1996, the present effort finds a lack of empirical evidence linking personnel reforms with results. The authors conclude with several perspectives for future assessments of PHRM reform and lessons for practice.

Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities’ attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice known as “résumé whitening.” Interviews with racial minority university students reveal that while some minority job seekers reject this practice, others view it as essential and use a variety of whitening techniques. Building on the qualitative findings, we conduct a lab study to examine how racial minority job seekers change their résumés in response to different job postings. Results show that when targeting an employer that presents itself as valuing diversity, minority job applicants engage in relatively little résumé whitening and thus submit more racially transparent résumés. Yet our audit study of how employers respond to whitened and unwhitened résumés shows that organizational diversity statements are not actually associated with reduced discrimination against unwhitened résumés. Taken together, these findings suggest a paradox: minorities may be particularly likely to experience disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity employers. These findings illuminate the role of racial concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and point to an important interplay between the self-presentation of employers and the self-presentation of job seekers in shaping economic inequality.

The author argues that the terminology and concept of “total rewards” is become increasingly meaningless and outdated in our postrecessionary economy of austerity and inequality. Its generic and unthinking application in uniform flexible benefits packages risks isolating the rewards profession into an administrative backwater. Instead he argues for a new approach that he provocatively titles “smart rewards,” following recent thinking and writing in economic and foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic. He discerns four components of this emerging reward management approach: a simpler and clearer focus on a few core values and principles, a stronger basis in evidence and measurement, more emphasis on employee engagement through rewards and improved and more open communications and line management of reward. Brown concludes that adapting and tailoring this type of approach is much more likely to create the genuinely business-enhancing and employee-engaging reward practices in our contemporary context that reward professionals and their policies aspire to.

Much has appeared in the literature about institutional voids, a component of institutional theory. Little has been written, however, about the effects of institutional voids on individuals in emerging market nations and how they might react in proactive ways, including leaving their home country problems to pursue opportunities elsewhere. This article focuses on how institutional voids can create opportunities not only for such individuals but also for the firms that they join and the national economies of their host countries. We illustrate this juxtaposition from problem to opportunity by providing background on institutional voids in Russia as well as the welcoming institutional environments experienced in the United States. We do so by presenting some early findings from a larger ongoing research project. We emphasize not only the individual successes of migrants we interviewed as they seized opportunities afforded by their substantial backgrounds but also the resulting benefits to the U.S. firms that they joined or founded, as well as to the U.S. innovation economy. As illustrations, we offer the profiles of three professionals who came from Russia around 2000. They are part of a much larger group that came from various countries of the former USSR whom we interviewed in the Silicon Valley and Boston–Cambridge innovation hubs.

You can register for your free trial of SAGE content by clicking here. Once you sign up for the free trial, you will have free online access to all SAGE journal content until April 30th 2016. SAGE’s portfolio includes more than 940 journals spanning the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology, and Medicine, and more than 400 are published on behalf of learned societies and institutions. Start your search today!

About Cynthia Nalevanko, Editor, SAGE Publishing

Founded in 1965, SAGE is the world’s leading independent academic and professional publisher.
Known for our commitment to quality and innovation, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students across a broad range of subject areas.
With over 1500 employees globally from principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC, and Melburne, our publishing program includes more than 1000 journals and over 900 books, reference works and databases a year in business, humanities, social sciences, science, technology and medicine.
Believing passionately that engaged scholarship lies at the heart of any healthy society and that education is intrinsically valuable, SAGE aims to be the world’s leading independent academic and professional publisher. This means playing a creative role in society by disseminating teaching and research on a global scale, the cornerstones of which are good, long-term relationships, a focus on our markets, and an ability to combine quality and innovation.
Leading authors, editors and societies should feel that SAGE is their natural home: we believe in meeting the range of their needs, and in publishing the best of their work. We are a growing company, and our financial success comes from thinking creatively about our markets and actively responding to the needs of our customers.